i believe the success of dogecoin was in part due to the inclusiveness of the community surrounding the coin. it's not intimidating. not full of savvy people who attitude is along the lines of - i learned cyrpto on my own, why can't you do the same?... or the answer is out there, you're just not looking hard enough. looking at the ethereum forum you can tell that the community is not inclusive to the general public, at least not right now it isn't. and i understand.

the willingness of the community to answer "stupid questions" and to help guide / make clear to those who are a little lost is one indication of the attitude of ethereum and the attitude of the early adopters/inverters. how this will effect this crypto is anyone's guess.

to answer my own question... as far as i have seen, the mining algo works on the test client... i've mined some ether.  but like vitalik have mentioned, ether, in theory, can be mined with cpu, gpu, memory and bandwidth. i would like to have something more concrete, more finalized in therms of the mining algo since we are no more than 6months away from launch. pref to have something before the sale. unless i am wrong, and the algo is already something finalized, please enlighten me. thank you.